... Spanish) political underground since the war and the book is thus dotted with interesting fragments about the area where the state, the intelligence services and political activity overlap. There are little bits of new information or perspectives, for example, on Will Owen, the Labour MP who was ripping-off the Czechs and got done (but acquitted) for espionage; the attempting framing of Peter Hain; agent provocateurs in the labour movement; the 'Angry Brigade'; Searchlight magazine, and the role of state agents here, there and everywhere. (I know nothing about Spanish history and just skipped those sections.) The book as whole is an interesting account of the post-war British left, ...

... 1975, p. 119. 16 For a further discussion see my British Counter-insurgency, op cit. 17 Roger Faligot, British Military Strategy in Ireland: The Kitson Experiment, London 1983. 18 Frank Kitson, Warfare As A Whole, London 1987, pp. 55-57. 19 Bernard Porter, Plots and Paranoia: A History of political espionage in Britain in 1790-1988, London 1989, p. 205. Last| Contents| Next ...

... in 1958 and moves on. When I came across this I looked at his bibliography: there is no Philip Agee, no L. Fletcher Prouty, no Victor Marchetti, no John Stockwell. He has written a history of the CIA ignoring all the Agency's main defectors and whistle-blowers. Yet in his previous book on this subject, American Espionage: from Secret Service to CIA (London: Collier, Macmillan, 1977) his bibliography contains both Marchetti and Agee and he cites both of them. But that was 1977 and attacking the Agency was tolerated; and he was then a junior academic and now he's a professor. All the way through Jeffreys-Jones' book the question arises ...

... much of the early research work was done by the Rand Corporation, the world's first think tank, and originally a Cold-War front for USAF intelligence. Initially, they were used in code-breaking. We learned only recently that US intelligence services had broken part of the Soviet codes as early as 1948, thus learning some of the reality of Soviet espionage penetration in the pre-war US. Andersen's official history states that the initial idea for business computing came from one of their employees, Joseph Glickauf- and that he developed the idea and an initial working model himself. Apart from the inherent improbability of a US accounting firm producing a computer genius around the same time another of their staff managed ...

... last few years MI5 has come out on top, replacing the Soviet 'threat' with the terrorist 'threat', and actually expanding its personnel, while MI6 and GCHQ are tightening (pretty generous) belts. Let's hope the IRA, the animals rights movement, Green Anarchist and the anti-roads campaigners are suitably flattered to be the equivalent of the espionage services of a super-power! For all the welcome candour of some of his interviewees, there are still corns that Urban won't tread on. The whole 'Wilson plots' revelations of 1986-89, thousands of column inches, the major cause of our present increased understanding of the British spooks, is evaded with a brief reference to the Peter Wright ...

... that the brilliant WWII black propaganda expert, Sefton Delmer, was a Soviet agent. In the mid-1950s Delmer was expelled from Egypt for being an SIS agent. President Abdel-Nasser, who played footsie with both the Americans and the Soviets, would have hardly have booted out a Soviet agent and risked jeopardizing Egyptian-Soviet relations. He also asserts that 'the espionage reporters of all the great papers all now work hand in glove with the Security Service'.(p. 155) Names please, Mr West? As to West's contention that Hollis was a traitor, and the publisher's blurb that Hollis 'for nine years was a communist spy', there is only one conclusion: not proven. ...

... . Marcello Truzzi commented:'..the recent strange CIA/AIR report which on the one hand indicates about a 15% above chance guessing rate while somehow managing to conclude that RV is not operationally useful (bad enough but also dismissing the many hits in the oper-ational, non-experimental efforts with RV). Given the low reliability of so many espionage methods and sources, one would have expected them to be delighted with 15% over chance. Obviously, the conclusions were dictated in advance of the evaluation study and were mostly politically motivated'.(10) Dr. Edwin C. May, Director of Research for Remote Viewing Programs for both the CIA and the DIA, also ...

... November 1948. Soon after, he escaped to South America. With a grim inevitability, Rauff ended up working for the Pinochet regime (Margaret Thatcher's favourite dictatorship), 'allegedly involved in the torture and deaths of many Chileans'. He died of a heart attack in May 1984. Goda's contribution on Croatia, 'The Ustas: Murder and Espionage', is also extremely interesting. Apparently, the Americans believed that the escape to Argentina of the Ustasa leader, Ante Pavelic, one of the worst Axis war criminals, was 'facilitated not only by the Vatican, but also by British intelligence'. Over a hundred senior Ustasa members escaped to Argentina courtesy of the Vatican in the ...

... future, had become a threat, as newspapers and the airwaves filled with doom-laden talk of the millions of jobs about to be destroyed by what was then called the 'silicon chip'. And Alec Guinness kept the nation spellbound with the television version of John le Carré's 1974 novel Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. It depicted the tempting of senior UK espionage moguls with a one-off, spectacular solution to Secret Britain's ills, a Soviet super-spy who would get us back in with the Americans and restore our standing in the world. In the real world, this sort of search for a painless way to get the Great back into Britain had been the biggest casualty of the 1970s. Now came ...

... problem of Britain's 'back door' Ireland, and the leakage of useful information. Fortunately, a combination of stringent British censorship, controls on shipping and intelligence co-operation saw the few German agents that landed there eventually rounded up; and it was established that the German legation was more keen to keep itself operational in a neutral country than undertake much espionage and intelligence gathering. Two agents who failed to make it to Ireland were Sean Russell and Frank Ryan, senior IRA men who sailed from Germany on a mission; but that was aborted when Russell died on board the U-boat, and it had to turn back because Ryan hadn't been given the details of the mission! To say the ...